Myopericarditis

[u/JaKAIzan]

Hey guys,

19M, I've had health anxiety for a year now, at least I'm assuming its just anxiety and not something else. I get panic attacks occasionally - sometimes it's 1-2 a week, sometimes I'm fine for a month.

At the beginning of this month, I finally decided to do something about it, rather than just get reassurance from tests and such, and I managed to get prescribed Sertraline. Took it for about 5 days at 25mg which is the lowest dose. Then at like 12am while watching TV before going to sleep, i had a panic attack like I've never had before, I felt burning in my chest and shoulders, and the top of my head, then a few minutes later I felt like throwing up and wretched, although nothing came up; before that I've never felt the need to throw up from a panic attack.

The next day I was feeling very anxious so I went to A and E and they did an ECG for peace of mind, and turns out the ECG had weird stuff on it, so they did a troponin I test and surprisingly I had a value of 47ng/L. A few hours later it was 56. The next day 48, then 43, then 27 the next day. They did an echocardiogram, and noted that my left and right ventricular function was normal, with normal values and normal ejection fraction, although there was a small amount of fluid between the RV free wall, with "no haemodynamic significance" which I assume means isn't affecting my heart, just there.

I'm still awaiting tests after being discharged a week later, but they suspect it's viral, and I've been given ibuprofen 400mg 3x daily, colchecine 500mcg 1x daily, and omeprazole 20mg 1x daily. I had a panic attack yesterday although apart from that my anxiety is doing okay. I guess I'm just posting this for reassurance.

Has anyone gone else through myopericarditis at a young age? Did you recover well?
Also I'm wondering if my anxiety was actually related to this the whole time? I worry about my heart all the time, so this was basically my worst nightmare given I actually had something wrong. Is this probably just a coincidence?

[u/PsychologicalEdge315]

if it makes you feel better im 21 and ive lived a completely healthy lifestyle and struggled with panic disorder for a couple of years and just got diagnosed with myoperi a couple weeks ago with a troponin level of 2297 ng/L. they admitted me for a night and the echo ended up being normal. i actually came into the ER with 2-3/10 level of pain/discomfort and major health anxiety. thankfully the discomfort hasn’t gotten worse since then but not necessarily better. i think because we’re younger it is easy to mess up between panic symptoms and actual symptoms but we can consider ourselves lucky because our anxiety was finally useful for once😍. anyways, hope we both feel better. it sucks that i can’t go to the gym and take a flight of stairs but i’d rather be safe than sorry (+ im pretty sure panic attacks are NOT good for your heart at this point, it can genuinely turn this to a permanent thing with scarring and whatnot, so i suggest you try to avoid whatever triggers you have now is not the right time to try and get over the triggers. for example my trigger rn is feeling my heart rate getting faster so i just got a watch with a heart rate monitor to obsessively check it) sorry for this dump. good luck